Dungeon Masters - Start Thy Engines!

So in order to help DMs figure out how they can get things going I wanted to outline a few steps that may help encourage you to get started and start running online games.

The Player's Handbook comes out tomorrow in FLGs and on the 18th everywhere else, and being that the rules from the Basic Rules PDF are less than a month old I can see why there are very few 5e games going on online. But, we have enough to get started now.

 

The Adventure

As of this date there is one adventure that is sanctioned for DnD's organized play: The Lost Mines of Phandelver and this comes in the Starter Set.  The adventure itself can be broken down into 2-3 hour chunks, and I'll do that in a later post, but being so early in the products life cycle, there will a good chance you'll be starting from the beginning with players that have never played it.  There will be more officially sanctioned adventures later on, but this is all we have right now, so not a difficult choice. If you don't already have it, I think they sell it pretty much everywhere.  Here's the official word on how to run Lost Mines for Adventurer's League characters now.

The Virtual Tabletop

If you are looking to run games online, the first thing you need to do is decide on a platform and build your campaign. There are plenty of platforms out there, and this article can't cover all of them but Roll20 seems to be the most popular and have the lowest learning curve.  And it's free.  But plenty of DMs have figured out Fantasy Grounds, Maptools (free), and RPGTable Online.  It all depends on what you are comfortable with. Collected links here with the various VTTs.

After you decide which platform, the next thing you'll need to do is build your campaign.  Now, given that 5e encourages "theater of the mind" this version of DnD could end up being one of the easiest versions to run on a VTT.  Battlemaps can be difficult to create, and what I've noticed is that online DMs tend to become perfectionist and want to recreate maps from modules as closely as possible.  And this takes time.  A lot of time.  Don't get bog down in it.  Most VTTs have drawing tools.  Use them. Find pictures online and link them or copy them onto the screen so players can get a visual sense of what you are explaining.  Trust me, don't get to bogged down in this.  It's a rabbit hole you can't escape once you go the route of, "it must be exact."  You can find community made maps for the Starter Set adventure here.

5e is comparatively very rules light.  You don't really need macros, online character sheets, you don't need automation of any kind which most platforms offer.  All you need is a place to type, a dice roller and a drawing board.  Everything else is gravy.

Find Players

I will allow myself some self promotion here; but so far the best place to find players for Adventurer's League games is our google group, the DnD Adventurer's League Online Collective.  All you need to do is start a thread.  The most important thing will be your title.  It should contain which module you are running, and any identifiers to help players figure out if it is a game they want to play.

After you recruit enough players, ask for the Adventurer's Log sheets if they have a character that has already played a session or more of AL games.  Ask for their character sheet, if you want as well. Make sure each player has a token on your campaign table, and you are good to go.  There are downloadable character and Adventurer's Log sheet here, and you can point them, making it easier to get the information that you want.

The intention of DALOC was to try and make DMing and finding Adventurer's League games online as easy as possible.  I hope this helps, and hurry up and get some games going!